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Tuesday, March 09, 2010

March 2010 Security Bulletin Release

Microsoft released two Important security bulletins addressing eight vulnerabilities in Windows and Microsoft Office. Both bulletins have an aggregate Exploitability Index rating of “1” so it is recommended that the updates be installed as soon as possible.

"MS10-016 addresses one vulnerability in Windows Movie Maker. Both Windows XP and Windows Vista ship with affected versions (2.1 and 6.0 respectively). Version 2.6 is also vulnerable and can be freely downloaded and installed from the web. Customers who install 2.6 on any supported platform, including Windows 7, will be offered the update. In order to take advantage of the vulnerability, a user would need to open a specially crafted Movie Maker project file. These are files with the .mswmm file extension.

The MS10-016 bulletin also calls out Microsoft Producer 2003 in the affected products list. Producer 2003 is a free download with limited distribution. At this time, we are not offering an update for Producer 2003. Our standard approach is to produce updates that can be deployed automatically for all affected products at the same time but Producer 2003 does not offer a means for automatic update. Based on our investigation, we determined that the best way to protect the vast majority of customers was to release an update addressing the components that shipped with Windows. While we continue to investigate Producer 2003, we recommend that customers either uninstall the application or apply an available Microsoft Fix It to disassociate the project file type from the application to add an extra layer of security."

"MS10-017 affects all currently supported versions of Microsoft Office Excel. It also affects Office 2004 and Office 2008 for Mac, the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac, supported versions of Excel viewer and SharePoint 2007. As with most Office vulnerabilities, a user would have to open a specially crafted file in order to be exploited."